This is the first in a series that looks at the first novels of authors who would go on to publish usually more accomplished work. Sometimes the reviews might seem overly critical but it is important to treat each work without hindsight and see how a writer learns from early mistakes and hones his or her craft. For context, the square brackets after the title give the age of the author at publication although a book might have been germinating from a much earlier age.
Such works should not be neglected even when it is clear that an author may cringe later at their own early efforts (even in a few cases try to suppress it). These put 'genius' into perspective as a hard learned craft (even if some authors manage to come out with masterpieces at their first attempt), remind us that persistence can pay if the right publisher is there to support the writer and that themes found in later work might sometimes be uncovered early - and so give insights into an author's psychological obsessions and anxieties.
The Orchard Keeper (1965) [Age: 32]
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's debut novel is intense, atmospheric but ultimately flawed. It shows signs both of his later genius and the abiding fault
of ambitious first novels in trying to be self-consciously
over-literary. We will come up against this problem with other writers.
In this case, it is hard to pin down what
precisely is going wrong as one works one's way through. The genius is
undoubtedly there, the command of language is superb and his
descriptions of nature are mostly flawless.
He just so damn good at what he does well that it
ironically points up where he fails in two directions - overwriting (to
the point of ennui at points) and an allusive obscurity that rather
arrogantly expects us to work as hard at reading the novel as he clearly
did at writing it.
The story in itself is more a description of a
situation than a clear narrative. Very poor and fairly uneducated
Appalachians (the story is set in Tennessee) come up against nature,
chance and necessity and, to some extent, an authority which has rules
that are to be both respected and evaded.
The publisher's 'blurb' tries to market
the book as a relationship between a bootlegger Marion Snyder and a
young boy, John Wesley, whose father, unbeknownst to the lad, was
killed, not without justification, by Snyder but I am not sure how much
this actually matters.
What we have instead are several
inter-connecting threads based around a particular locality which is partly civilised and partly wild. McCarthy is excellent on such
easily forgotten matters as the nature of mud, how water flows in creeks
and how people actually hit each other.
The particular set
pieces where things happen to people or people make journeys or men
relate to other men (or their dogs and other animals) are, in themselves,
masterful. Women are very much secondary, even irrelevant, to the tale
but, frankly, that does not matter here.
So where does it fail?
It fails because McCarthy had an extremely bad case of 'similitis' -
over and over again in describing nature (which takes up a good
proportion of the book) he uses simile and metaphor to excess and, at a
certain point, it comes to look over-elaborate and condescending.
The
use of 'as if' or 'like' develops into a tic which seems to mimic the
epic tradition. McCarthy is a little too clever by
half in implying that his rough-hewn laconic Appalachians are somehow
closer to the Ancient Greeks or Romans than at first sight appears
plausible.
In fact, such an idea might have merit. There is an
air of implied tragedy (though muted by a weak if still
partially caring State) as well as perhaps a bucolic relationship to
nature, for all its harshness, of Appalachian people compared to those
who live in cities like Knoxville.
It is a noble experiment but
it does not quite work. The brilliant natural descriptions get
bogged down periodically in an extended 'literariness' that seems
surplus to requirements. It is the same error made by the much younger
(when he wrote his first novel) Graham Greene as we shall see later.
I used the word
'condescending'. It might be right to do so when you discover
that McCarthy was a Rhode Island boy who moved to Knoxville when he was six
and that his father was a lawyer with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Perhaps
the disciplined and ambitious literary near-graduate (he did not
actually graduate) was both fascinated and a little frightened by the
horny-handed law avoiders of the hills. Perhaps he is trying to put them
in a literary box where they can be understood better by 'his type'.
Let
me be clear that he is not at all condescending towards his characters. They have a fictional reality self-evidently drawn from close knowledge
of the local culture and environment. It is perhaps only condescending
in its attempt to make this world literary and box it in.
It is
as if he takes a world that he can observe and record masterfully (both
the countryside and its human and animal inhabitants) but then treats
them as little more than raw material for a somewhat narcissistic
literary ambition which he eventually is going to have to shake off.
Of course, it is the work that matters (which is fine) but
he could have done a better job at masking his condescension and not accidentally
showing himself as precursor by half a century of the educated
distancing from the people who would probably be voting for Trump in 2016.
We
cannot make contemporary political points based on a man writing in the
early 1960s about the late 1930s (and able to use the word 'nigger' as
it would have been used by the men of his time) but the literariness
creates two worlds for us - the educated writer's and the uneducated
subject.
Yet this is a matter largely of style (an obsession with right
style is precisely the flaw) rather than of content. McCarthy does not deny agency
to his subjects. Far from it. If there is some stereotyping it is the stereotyping
that reflects reality. If a cop is a brute then it is because cops
could be brutes.
The book is a little harder to read than it
should be. Its arrogant style (when dealing with nature) nevertheless contrasts with a lack of such arrogance in providing the content of the narrative (especially when dealing with
humanity). Things do not always need to be 'like' other things to be
fully understood.
Whatever the irritations, you know when you
come to the end of the book that you are dealing with more than a fine
writer. You are dealing with a potential literary genius. The irritations arise from this literary genius not seeing the humane wood because of his
intense concern with the literary trees.